Reddit’s lawsuit over AI-era scraping survived an early challenge after a federal judge largely denied SerpApi’s motion to dismiss. Reddit alleges that SerpApi conspired with Perplexity AI to scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results despite access controls.
US District Judge Paul Engelmayer said Reddit had plausibly pleaded that SerpApi provided a product to circumvent Google protections and that Perplexity paid for it. The ruling does not decide the case, but it keeps Reddit’s core theory alive.
The case matters because it tests how licensing deals, search snippets, deleted posts, and anti-circumvention rules apply when AI answer engines seek large amounts of platform content. Reddit argues that unauthorized scraping undermines its ability to honor user deletions and damages both trust and revenue.
SerpApi has argued that Google and Reddit are trying to wall off the open internet through the DMCA. The next stages will show whether Reddit can prove that the scraped material was protected by a technological measure and that the defendants unlawfully bypassed it.